Rodney Marvin "Rod" McKuen (April 29, 1933 – January 29, 2015) was an American singer-songwriter, musician and poet. He was one of the best-selling poets in the United States during the late 1960s. Throughout his career, McKuen produced a wide range of recordings, which included popular music, spoken word poetry, film soundtracks and classical music. He earned two Academy Award nominations and one Pulitzer nomination for his music compositions. McKuen's translations and adaptations of the songs of Jacques Brel were instrumental in bringing the Belgian songwriter to prominence in the English-speaking world. His poetry deals with themes of love, the natural world and spirituality. McKuen's songs sold over 100 million recordings worldwide, and 60 million books of his poetry were sold as well, according to the Associated Press.[1]

McKuen was born on April 29, 1933, in a Salvation Army hostel in Oakland, California.[2] He never knew his biological father who had left his mother.[3] Sexually and physically abused by relatives,[4] raised by his mother and stepfather, who was a violent alcoholic, McKuen ran away from home at the age of 11. He drifted along the West Coast, supporting himself as a ranch hand, surveyor, railroad worker, lumberjack, rodeo cowboy, stuntman, and radio disk jockey, always sending money home to his mother.[5]

To compensate for his lack of formal education, McKuen began keeping a journal, which resulted in his first poetry and song lyrics. After dropping out of Oakland Technical High School prior to graduating in 1951,[6] McKuen worked as a newspaper columnist and propaganda script writer during the Korean War. He settled in San Francisco, where he read his poetry in clubs alongside Beat poets like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.[3] He began performing as a folk singer at the famed Purple Onion. Over time, he began incorporating his own songs into his act. He was signed to Decca Records and released several pop albums in the late 1950s. McKuen also appeared as an actor in Rock, Pretty Baby (1956), Summer Love (1958), and the western Wild Heritage (1958). He also sang with Lionel Hampton's band. In 1959, McKuen moved to New York City to compose and conduct music for the TV show The CBS Workshop.[5]

In 1978, after hearing of Brel's death, McKuen was quoted as saying, "As friends and as musical collaborators we had traveled, toured and written – together and apart – the events of our lives as if they were songs, and I guess they were. When news of Jacques' death came I stayed locked in my bedroom and drank for a week. That kind of self-pity was something he wouldn't have approved of, but all I could do was replay our songs (our children) and ruminate over our unfinished life together."[7]

In the late 1960s, McKuen began to publish books of poetry, earning a substantial following among young people with collections like Stanyan Street & Other Sorrows (1966), Listen to the Warm (1967), and Lonesome Cities (1968). His Lonesome Cities album of readings won a Grammy for Best Spoken Word Recording in 1968.[5] McKuen's poems were translated into eleven languages and his books sold over 1 million copies in 1968 alone.[8] McKuen said that his most romantic poetry was influenced by American poet Walter Benton's two books of poems.[7] McKuen sold over 60 million books worldwide, according to the Associated Press.[1]

In 1959, McKuen released a novelty single with Bob McFadden, under the pseudonym Dor on the Brunswick label, called "The Mummy". The McKuen-written song reached No. 39 on the Billboardpop chart.[11] In 1961, he had a hit single titled "Oliver Twist". He co-wrote it along with Gladys Shelley and the Spiral label-issued single reached No. 76 on the Billboardpop chart.[12] His hoarse and throaty singing voice on these and other recordings was a result of McKuen straining his vocal chords in 1961, due to too many promotional appearances.[2]

In 1967, McKuen began collaborating with arranger Anita Kerr and the San Sebastian Strings for a series of albums featuring McKuen's poetry recited over Kerr's mood music, including The Sea (1967), The Earth (1967), The Sky (1968), Home to the Sea (1969), For Lovers (1969), and The Soft Sea (1970). Jesse Pearson was the narrator of The Sea and its followups Home to the Sea and The Soft Sea, while most other albums in the series had McKuen narrating. In 1969, Frank Sinatra commissioned an entire album of poems and songs by McKuen; arranged by Don Costa, it was released under the title A Man Alone: The Words and Music of Rod McKuen. The album featured the song "Love's Been Good to Me", which became one of McKuen's best-known songs.[5]

McKuen performed solo in a half-hour special broadcast by NBC on May 10, 1969. The program, billed as McKuen's "first television special", featured the songs "The Loner", "The World I Used to Know", "The Complete Madame Butterfly", "I've Been to Town", "Kaleidoscope", "Stanyan Street", "Lonesome Cities", "Listen to the Warm", "Trashy", and "Merci Beaucoup". It was produced by Lee Mendelson, producer of the Peanuts specials, and directed by Marty Pasetta. James Trittipo designed a set that was "evocative of waterfront pilings" and Arthur Greenslade conducted the orchestra.[13] McKuen's connection to Peanuts was solidified that same year when he wrote and performed the title song to A Boy Named Charlie Brown, the first feature-length animation based on Charles M. Schulz's popular comic strip, and In 1971, he hosted a series, The Rod McKuen Show, on BBC television in the UK.[14]

McKuen's Academy Award-nominated composition "Jean", sung by Oliver, reached No.1 in 1969 on the BillboardAdult Contemporary chart and stayed there for four weeks.[15] In 1971, his song "I Think of You" was a major hit for Perry Como. Other popular McKuen compositions included "The World I Used to Know", "Rock Gently", "Doesn't Anybody Know My Name", "The Importance of the Rose", "Without a Worry in the World", and "Soldiers Who Want to Be Heroes".[5]

In 1971, McKuen became highly popular in the Netherlands, where "Soldiers Who Want to Be Heroes" and "Without a Worry in the World" became major hits, both reaching number one in the Dutch charts; the album Greatest Hits Vol. 3 became a number one record as well. All three discs earned him gold records and he was voted Holland's most popular entertainer.[16]

During the 1970s, McKuen began composing larger-scale orchestral compositions, writing a series of concertos, suites, symphonies, and chamber pieces for orchestra. His piece The City: A Suite for Narrator & Orchestra, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Music. He continued publishing a steady stream of poetry books throughout the decade. In 1977, he published Finding My Father, a chronicle of his search for information on his biological father. The book and its publicity helped make such information more readily available to adopted children.[citation needed] He also continued to record, releasing albums such as New Ballads (1970), Pastorale (1971), and the country-rock outing McKuen Country (1976).[5]

McKuen continued to perform concerts around the world and appeared regularly at New York's Carnegie Hall throughout the 1970s, making sporadic appearances as recently as the early 2000s.

In 1973, at forty, McKuen radically changed his outward appearance ; He no longer bleached his hair and he grew a beard.

McKuen retired from live performances in 1981. The following year, he was diagnosed with clinical depression, which he battled for much of the next decade. He continued to write poetry, however, and made appearances as a voice-over actor in The Little Mermaid and the TV series The Critic.[5]

2001 saw the publication of McKuen's A Safe Place to Land, which contains 160 pages of new poetry. For 10 years he gave an annual birthday concert at Carnegie Hall or the Lincoln Center. He released the double CD The Platinum Collection and was remastering all of his RCA and Warner Bros. recordings for release as CD boxed sets. In addition to his artistic pursuits he was the Executive President of the American Guild of Variety Artists, a post he held longer than any other man or woman elected to the position.

McKuen lived in Southern California with his brother Edward, whom he called his "partner", and four cats in a large rambling Spanish house built in 1928, which housed one of the world's largest private record collections.[17] He died of respiratory arrest, a result of pneumonia, at a hospital in Beverly Hills, California, on January 29, 2015.[3]

McKuen refused to identify as gay, straight, or bisexual, but once explained his sexuality saying, "I can't imagine choosing one sex over the other, that's just too limiting. I can't even honestly say I have a preference."[18] He was active in the LGBT rights movement, and as early as the 1950s, was a key member of the San Francisco chapter of the Mattachine Society, one of the nation's earliest LGBT advocacy organizations.[19] The cover of McKuen's 1977 album Slide... Easy In featured a photo of a man's arm gripping a handful of vegetable shortening; the can was a pastiche of Crisco – then widely used by gay men as a sexual lubricant – with the label instead reading "Disco". That same year, McKuen spoke out against singer Anita Bryant and her "Save Our Children" campaign to repeal an anti-discrimination ordinance in Miami, tagging Bryant with the nickname "Ginny Orangeseed", and also including a song on Slide... Easy In titled "Don't Drink the Orange Juice", referencing Bryant's fame as commercial pitchwoman for the Florida Citrus Commission. He often gave benefit performances to aid LGBT rights organizations and to fund AIDS research.[20]

Despite his popular appeal, McKuen's work was never taken seriously by critics or academics. Michael Baers observed in Gale Research's St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture that "through the years his books have drawn uniformly unkind reviews. In fact, criticism of his poetry is uniformly vituperative ..."[21]

Frank W. Hoffmann, in Arts and Entertainment Fads, described McKuen's poetry as "tailor-made for the 1960s ... poetry with a verse that drawled in country cadences from one shapeless line to the next, carrying the rusticated innocence of a Carl Sandburg thickened by the treacle of a man who preferred to prettify the world before he described it".[8]

Philosopher and social critic Robert C. Solomon described McKuen's poetry as "sweet kitsch,"[22] and, at the height of his popularity in 1969, Newsweek magazine called him "the King of Kitsch."[23]

In a Chicago Tribune interview with McKuen in 2001 as he was "testing the waters" for a comeback tour, Pulitzer Prize-winning culture critic Julia Keller claimed that "Millions more have loathed him [...] finding his work so schmaltzy and smarmy that it makes the pronouncements of Kathie Lee Gifford sound like Susan Sontag," and that his work "drives many people crazy. They find it silly and mawkish, the kind of gooey schmaltz that wouldn't pass muster in a freshman creative-writing class" while stating that "The masses ate him up with a spoon, while highbrow literary critics roasted him on a spit." She noted that the third concert on his tour had already been canceled because of sluggish ticket sales.[25]